Or, if anyone wants to take this back to ’94, maybe that should be the Wackness of the Whale?
Caleb Crain had the great idea to cut and paste the entire text of Moby-Dick into the online tag-cloud widget Worldle, which he asked to search for the top 365 words. Here’s what resulted:
I thought about this image yesterday when my kids and I climbed on board the schooner Pioneer and, following the safety speech, the captain said out loud, to no one and everyone, in spite of the beautiful July skies: “Whenever it is a damp, drizzly, November in my soul …” And then we went sailing.
In other NYC literary reference matters …
Readers familiar with my left shoulder will know I wear my Whitmania on my sleeve, as it were. So I’m always tickled to find new Walt goodies on the Web. Until recently I’d never stumbled across the page Whitman’s Brooklyn, which I highly recommend, especially to those who feel like the fellow sold out when he designated himself a son of Manhattan. Seriously, though, can you imagine it if the line went: “Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Brooklyn the son”?
Finally, I should note that I found Whitman’s Brooklyn via a comment on Edge of the American West, one of our favorite blogs. On a few occasions we’ve shamelessly borrowed the format for their regular “This Day in History” feature, and I’m sure we’ll do so again. It’s too good an idea not to steal. (Though I think Cyrus beat them to finding a relevant date for memorializing a Stones album.) On the 5th of July their newest contributor, SEK, a PhD candidate out on that side of the continent, put up some of Whitman’s anonymous self-promotional meta-poetry to honor the anniversary of shamelessly promoting Leaves. (The anniversary for Leaves itself was, of course, on the 4th.) It’s worth checking out if you’ve never seen it, but don’t let it stand for returning to the original.
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